The votes have been counted and the decision is in for the second annual Mess+Noise Staff and Critics’ Poll of the Best Australian Release. The top 20 for 2007 are listed below, with appreciations by the writers of Mess+Noise for the final five. Don’t forget, you can vote in the accompanying Mess+Noise Users’ Poll for the Best Australian Release of 2007 by logging in and visiting this thread.

20
Grinderman
Grinderman (Mute)

T18
Ned Collette
Future Suture (Dot Dash)

T18
Castings
Punk Rock Is Bunk Squawk (Spanish Magic)

17
Love of Diagrams
Mosaic (Matador)

16
Young and Restless
Young and Restless (Dot Dash)

15
Muscles
Guns Babes Lemonade (Modular)

T13
HandHell
Phonography (Dusky Sounds)

T13
Fabulous Diamonds
Fabulous Diamonds 7-inch single (Mistletone/Nervous Jerk)

T11
Batrider
Tara (No Promo)

T11
Bad Luck Charms
Rant & Drift (Consumer Productions)

10
M. Craft
Silver and Fire (Longtime Listener)

9
Aleks and the Ramps
Pisces Vs Aquarius (Cavalier)

8
Mist & Sea
Unless (Popfrenzy)

7
Tim Rogers
The Luxury of Hysteria (Ruby Q)

6
Pikelet
Pikelet (Chapter Music)

5
Midnight Juggernauts
Dystopia (Siberia)

Records like this don’t just fall out of the sky. The back story to Midnight Juggernauts’ debut album, Dystopia, is almost as interesting as its triumphant postscript. A Melbourne speed-metal enthusiast and his childhood friend start making sci-fi electronica for a lark. They take the names of infamous dictators – Gaddafi and Noriega – and play the odd gig at the once hip, but now defunct Honky Tonks. A following builds, a hit single is unleashed (‘Shadows’) and suddenly they’re in Daft Punk’s MySpace Top Eight.

The Midnight Juggernauts’ debut long-player, while highly anticipated, was hardly predictable. While most expected indie dance-floor rousers, Dystopia expertly delivered the party and the comedown in one. ‘Road to Recovery' and the aforementioned ‘Shadows’ built euphoric peaks from bedroom beats and icy synths, only for the Air-y title track and ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues’, a moody synthesis of Pulp and Power Station, to cool it all down. Dystopia was a watershed release in a year where indie electronica, not retread rock & roll, became our greatest musical export. And with Europe and the US already conquered, space may well be the final frontier for our Jugs.

 - Darren Levin

4
Sly Hats
Liquorice Night (Nervous Jerk)

Sometimes the alphabet does your work for you: my copy of Sly Hats’ Liquorice Nights sits between Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On and Small World Experience’s Shelf Life, which seems hotly relevant to the album’s pointed and scary resonant miserable good humour. The time I spent getting acquainted closely with Liquorice Nights I still remember well: I was driving around the Jervis Bay area, hanging round the Vincentia shopping centre, and it was raining lightly, and it was winter. Songs like ‘Terrified’ and ‘Will You?’ and the title track were all haunted and confessional like something out of one of the Pats (Barker, White, Ridgewell). But this wasn’t a cool record: it was gawky and spotty, its protagonist (who I took to be Geoff O’Connor, since they were his songs) lusted after and in a rather absentminded way, just lusting, particularly when it came to the subject of lips.

O’Connor is unreflective about Liquorice Nights when I discuss it with him. He concedes (I believe Mess+Noise’s Eliza Sarlos has already elicited this from him) that recording could have gone on forever, if he didn’t have the deadline of an international tour. “I had to get it finished quickly,” he says. “That was a good thing, it really made me work at it. At the same time I feel like I might have rushed it… The songs were all about personal things,” he adds, though I’m sure he’s denied this in other interviews. “They’re about (pause) changing circumstances. But they’re love songs really.” There is a folk pulse running through the Sly Hats’ songs – listen to the first part of ‘Tissue Whisper’ for instance – very Doug Ashdown, very Fred Neil; very deserted winter beachfront empty kiosk, bleached skeleton in a backyard bath. Yum!

 - David Nichols

3
Kes
The Grey Goose Wing (Mistletone)

Perusing the internet for critical praise of this strange bird, this wild goose, I came across four references to experimental, two for surreal, three for organic, one haphazard, two romantic; there were four mentions of its outsider status, two references to its sense of fun, three mentions of delicate and psychedelic, one mention of psychedelicate, two fresh, one playful, three timeless, two unusual, one esoteric, one out of the ordinary, one it’s so fucking warm, one weird, but not too weird, three said it was just plain weird, one genuine, two sincere, three chaotic, four beautiful, five unique, ‘one serious and silly and this juxtaposition works in Kes’ favour,’ said Richard MacFarlane in Brag Magazine. There were three funnies, one solemn, one high, two stoned, two yelpings and one loosey-goosey, there was one discovery of abandon, three pastorals, one off-kilter, two off-keys, five eccentric, one wobbly, two lively, one ungainly, one skewed, two enthusiastic, three mentions of adventurous, two happy, one unhindered playfulness, two easygoing, one child-like, two quirky, three enigmatic and one unusual soundscapes with rich filmic qualities. Of course there was.

Yet, no mention of Karl’s guitar (no frills, just his fingers and feeling) and how it cries out like a Princely purple dove to his Rumpelstiltskin voice (it does); or how the harmonica on ‘Irritating Gift’ sounds like it was pried from the grip of Stevie Wonder sometimes in the mid-80s, or nothing about Laura Jean’s lovely vocal turn on ‘Ghost’, or how Julian Patterson’s drums rock better than any album since BDP’s ‘Love’s Gonna Get’cha’ (and those beats weren’t even made by humans!) I dig the bum notes and studio mirth, the giddy retardation of vocals and what’s up with the absence of Satan on the songs that go backwards, I want to know! Also how ‘Only When Asked’ has the power to compel dorks at a Dungeon & Dragon’s convention to turn into happy hippies and dance like the punchbowl was spiked by Kes. You’d think Karl and Co. would have a stockpile of psychedelics, but no, they are dedicated tea drinkers, probably the maddest part of all.

 - Shane Moritz

2
Rand & Holland
Caravans (Spunk!)

It is difficult to write a good pop record, more difficult still to write a graceful one, one where the music sounds like a natural fact. Most of pop’s thrill lies in the sparkle of machination – the sense of a song (or an album) well put together: even indie-pop, for all its apparent disavowal of such factory-line vulgarity, polishes its shoes in the gleam of the Brill Building and borrows its best rhythms from girl groups of the long-vanished 60s. So why does Caravans work so brilliantly, borrowing nothing from such precedents, meandering like a hazy summer road trip that gathers a faint smudge of cloudbank the further it goes on?

Call it experience. It took songwriter Brett Thompson four years to craft a follow-up to Rand & Holland’s acclaimed debut, 2003’s Tomorrow Will Be Like Today. Trading in the bass for an acoustic guitar, and moody stasis for a gentle feeling of motion, Caravans is an album of near-perfectly judged songs, beautifully melodic, played and produced with an assured lightness of touch. Light is the best metaphor for this record, from opener ‘The Light’, half-lullaby, half-redemption song, to the closing ‘Beanstalk’, which has the bright-eyed clarity of a morning brimming with promise: “I’m ten foot tall/The world’s so small/From up here I can see it all.”

Caravans was released in January 2007, and it’s testament to the album’s understated power (and yes, to its craft) that it still sits so high in listeners’ esteem a year on. But what really underlined Rand & Holland’s status as one of our very best bands was their live show: they spent most of 2007 playing Caravans, and inventing it anew every time. Sometimes just the core duo of Brett Thompson and Stu Olsen would take to the stage; at other times there’d be three, four, possibly six people onboard. Tempestuous, sombre, celebratory, delicate – they traversed every mood, never taking their material for granted. And neither should we. An album this gorgeous doesn’t come along very often.

 - Emmy Hennings

1
The Devastations
Yes, U (Beggars Banquet)

Yes, U makes me want to fuck and shiver in equal measure. Every note on the album is imbued with an intoxicating mixture of darkness and sexuality. In some parts it can be terrifying. “Let’s turn off the lights/Let’s pretend we’re dead,” Conrad Standish sings to his lover on ‘Oh Me, Oh My’, a song that evokes the desperate extremes of desire as much as the sweaty bed sheets its characters are bound in. On ‘The Pest’, guitarist and second songwriter Tom Carlyon adopts the persona of a stalker penning a love-letter to his victim. “You’d make a beautiful wife,” he recites coldly. “Have I made myself clear?”

Inspired by the outer-space electronic sounds of artists like Suicide, Yoko Ono and Barry Adamson, and infused with the glammed-up funk of David Bowie, Yes, U was a radical departure from The Devastations first two albums. When the band – Standish, Carlyon and drummer Hugo Cran – left Melbourne for Europe circa 2004, they were stuck in the shadow of predecessors like Nick Cave and contemporaries The Drones. Their third album, recorded in Berlin, mixed in New York and featuring guests Andrea Lee on piano and HTRK’s Nigel Yang on drum machine, was as much about escaping from the history of Australian artists that had relocated to Europe as discovering their own sonic identity.

Unlike The Drones’ Gala Mill, the record that topped last year’s Mess+Noise Critics’ Poll and on which songwriter Gareth Liddiard expanded his lyrical talent to cover multiple CD booklet pages, Yes, U was an exercise in saying little but conveying much: on ‘Mistakes’ Standish repeated the same three words “I make mistakes” over and over again. That one simple line, sung in a tone suggesting it could be either a sigh of resignation or a boyish gloat, coupled with the incredible sonic texture of the record, spoke as much about the human condition as Liddiard's carefully-constructed tales of woe. Yes, U is a minimal album on first listen that reveals itself as an odyssey with each spin.

 - Andrew Ramadge

Compiled from the votes of: Trevor Block, Danny Bos, Ben Butcher, A.H. Cayley, Troy D Colvin, Carl Dixon, Patrick Emery, Matt Giles, Ben Gook, Emmy Hennings, Daniel Herborn, Darren Levin, Craig Mathieson, Pat McGrath, Benjamin Millar, Adam D Mills, Shane Moritz, David Nichols, Shaun Prescott, Andrew Ramadge, Eliza Sarlos, Tim Scott, Adrian Trajstman, and Lauren Zoric.

2006 Critic’s Poll Top 5

1 The Drones
Gala Mill (ATP)
2 The Crayon Fields
Animal Bells (Trifekta/Chapter)
3 My Disco
Cancer (Numerical Thief)
4 Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Eddy Current Suppression Ring (Dropkick)
5 Augie March
Moo, You Bloody Choir (Sony BMG)

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